Good: DAoC had a great initial design Bad: Mythic has a nasty case of "Killer DM" syndrome. They ignored the complaints of their playerbase for two years after ToA's release without doing anything until it was too late and WoW provided another place for the playerbase to go. By the time Mythic finally fixed ToA (prompted by their plummeting subscriber numbers) it was too late.
And of course, EA is now in the loop. They don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to MMOs... How many games have they attempted to launch that either never made to launch or were spectacular failures after launch? I don't know the numbers, but it's 100% of any MMO attempt from EA so far.
"One thing I really like about the USE of the iPhone (rather than just cataloguing model numbers) is that with a full modern Web browser in my pocket at all times, I'm eating the lunch of all the business people in your company who are either chained to the Web via PC or away from the Web, using the Internet for email only. They are standing still to me. Email is like 1950, the Web is 1990, and Web 2.0 is 2005 so I'm like 55 years ahead of the people who work at your company. Like I said, I'm eating their lunch. And at a broader selection of better restaurants because it's so easy to find them and make reservations with an iPhone." Encrypted email is more recent, especially encrypted local storage of emails. That's apparently too new for the iPhone (locally stored emails and other data are not encrypted). Same for anti-tamper (after more than N botched logins, locally stored encrypted data is deleted, preventing a brute-force attempt.)
Admittedly, both PalmOS and Windows Mobile don't come with such features by default, but unlike the iPhone, the manufacturers of PalmOS and Windows Mobile devices realize their customers might want something that didn't come with the phone in the first place.
I have (well had - my 8525 was returned and I ordered an unlocked HTC TyTn II, hopefully it will be here by the end of the week) a full web browser in my phone, and if for some reason Pocket IE is deficient for me, I have at least three alternatives (Opera Mobile, Minimo, and there's at least one other).
Comparing the Blackjack to the iPhone ($99 with contract vs. $399 with contract) isn't really a good comparison. While it is ahead of the iPhone in terms of ability to run third-party apps (and is why it was included in my list), it is crippled in other ways. It runs Windows Mobile "Smartphone Edition" - While smartphone used to be a good term meaning "integrated PDA and phone", Microsoft has redefined it to mean a crippled Windows Mobile device without a touchscreen. Still, given a choice of iPhone or Blackjack, I'd take the Blackjack myself, since it's a far more flexible device despite the lack of touchscreen. Heck, I'd rather use my old Treo 650 than an iPhone since I'm not an Apple zealot (OS X is a nice OS for desktop users, but it has by no means outclassed Windows or Linux in all areas as you claim it has, especially not a combination of Windows and Linux used in the areas which each excels.) That said, I went for something better than both devices.
I've heard people commenting "but the iPhone runs OS X!" - iPhone OS is to OS X desktop as Windows Mobile is to Windows XP - They are a completely different animal from their desktop variants.
Where in the world did you get Sprint or Verizon from?
Or maybe original poster should have been more clear that in addition to Verizon/Sprint EVDO, AT&T also has a 3G network (UMTS) which the iPhone is incapable of using?
"3. The one thing that this article failed to mention that the other AT&T phones are handsets with limited OS installed and low data rate capabilities, and this is a smartphone with a reduced feature version of OS X installed and alledged high data rate capabilities. The point being that the iPhone is a little more complicated than a free Nokia or Motorolla phone."
The iPhone is a crippled dumphone compared to other phones sold by AT&T such as: AT&T 8525 (aka HTC TyTn/Hermes - now obsolete, will be replaced by the HTC TyTn II/Kaiser aka AT&T 8925 aka AT&T Tilt within a few weeks) - Full support for third-party apps, UMTS capability (iPhone only does EDGE), slide-out keyboard (so much nicer than a touchscreen), and about the same price as an iPhone with contract. Samsung Blackjack - Also does UMTS, somewhat crippled compared to the 8525 (Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition, i.e. no touchscreen), but far cheaper. (See the other poster talking about their Blackjack.) AT&T/Cingular 3125 - One of HTC's lower-end smartphones. Still, it's Windows Mobile based which means it fully welcomes third-party apps. Palm Treo 750 - Somewhere in between the Blackjack and 8525. Touchscreen, but slower CPU than the 8525 and no WiFi.
AT&T also has the Treo 680, which doesn't do 3G and is using the aging PalmOS, but given a choice between an open-to-developers PalmOS and the iPhone, I'll take PalmOS. I'd rather stay with my old Treo 650 than use an overpriced cripple like the iPhone.
The iPhone has the distinction of being the first phone to be explicitly named as "not approved for business use" by my company. Admittedly, anything not explicitly approved is verboten for accessing email, but the iPhone has the distinction of being the only one explicitly called out as being forbidden.
I don't know about IMPS, but in the case of XMPP vs. SIMPLE:
XMPP started out oriented towards instant messaging and presence, voice signaling (Jingle) was added later
SIP started out oriented towards voice signaling (actually session initiation for voice and video), messaging and presence were added later with SIMPLE.
Essentially what started out as standards covering two distinct arenas were extended to accomodate a desire for convergence/integration, with the end being that there is now significant overlap between them.
That said, XMPP does messaging/presence better than SIP as it was designed primarily for it, and SIP does media session signaling better than messaging/presence as that was its primary design. Microsoft Communicator is the only SIMPLE implementation (if you could even call it that because it is so badly mangled) I've seen that is typically used for messaging/presence first and media secondary.
Yes, but in the case of diabetes, the disease is defined by the final symptom, not the root cause.
The root cause serves to differentiate between the various causes of the final symptom (excessive urination due to elevated sugar levels in the blood), allowing the disease to be subcategorized. (Type I has a different root cause than Type II for example, they are both considered diabetes due to having the same end result.)
If a disease does not cause excessive urination, it is not diabetes in any form, even if its root cause may be related to some forms of diabetes.
Also, while the "root cause" might be insulin-related in Alzheimer's, the end symptom does not include elevated bloodsugars, which cause frequent urination. Thus Alzheimer's is NOT another form of diabetes, even if it is somehow affected by insulin, as frequent urination does not occur.
The term Diabetes originates from the Greek word for "to pass through" or "to siphon", referring to one of the most obvious symptoms of elevated bloodsugar, frequent urination. Also, there are forms of diabetes that do not even involve insulin and elevated bloodsugars.
I know of at least two very general categories of diabetes:
Diabetes Mellitus - Often referred to simply as diabetes, and "diabetes" without a qualifying term is generally accepted to mean DM. In DM, when excessive urination occurs, it is always laden with sugar due to elevated bloodsugar. All of the categories of diabetes listed above are variants of DM.
Diabetes Insipidus - Characterized by excessive urination without elevated levels of sugar in the urine. It is diabetes, yet has nothing to do with blood sugar levels or insulin malfunctions.
So while Alzheimer's may be caused by some sort of insulin malfunction, it is not diabetes, as the defining symptom of diabetes is not present.
Nokia has a bad habit of purchasing companies that develop software and products for their competitors and then killing said products.
For example, a few years ago they bought out a PalmOs developer (who at the time made NOTHING for Nokia phones) and then killed off all of that developer's product lines. (If I recall correctly, it was one of the developers of instant messaging applications.) I don't remember the name of the developer off of the top of my head.
Now, I don't foresee Nokia killing off Navteq product lines in a similar manner, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a LOT harder for people who develop software for Windows Mobile or PalmOS to license Navteq data. (It's hard enough to license Navteq data as it is...)
I've seen a number of reports that just like Apple, Nokia does not permit unsigned apps on Symbian phones.
It's really sad when a Microsoft product (Windows Mobile) is the most open of the mainstream mobile OSes. You get a warning the first time you try to run an unsigned app on a Windows Mobile device, but that's it.
The only thing more open than Windows Mobile I've seen so far is OpenMoko. Most of the other Linux-for-phone implementations appear to be Tivoized to varying degrees.
Except Apple has not bricked any unlocked cell phones. (Excepting a handful that failed the update which would likely have been bricked anyway - I recall seeing somewhere that the number of bricked phones is very small, and about equal between unhacked and hacked phones.) Let's face it, any firmware flash contains some risk. (I don't know how Apple has been handling truly bricked phones, everyone seems to be interpreting "reset to factory defaults" as "bricked".)
The only thing that has happened is that third-party apps have been rendered inaccessible and the SIMLock has been reinstated. Nothing more. For all practical purposes bricked if you bought the phone to do something it wasn't advertised as being able to do, but by no means actually "bricked" (as in completely inoperable.)
Yup. In fact, in many cases, it turns out that Ph. Ds actually have a HARDER time finding employment (at least in the corporate world) because they are too specialized. So the cost/benefit analysis for "do I go to grad school or straight to work" is rather unfavorable for obtaining an M.S., but it is even worse for a Ph. D.
In my situation - I have an M.S., although I'm beginning to regret having spent the time obtaining it. I hardly use any of the knowledge I gained in my current job, and it basically only hurt me financially. While I had a deal where it basically cost me nothing to obtain my graduate degree, this is the basic situation:
An M.S. typically takes two years to complete. At my company, an M.S. gives a new hire an automatic promotion to a "level 2" pay grade. At my company, the average time it takes for a new hire with only a B.S. to get promoted to a level 2 is two years. So at the end of two years, you are (on average) at the same pay grade regardless of whether you went to graduate school or not. For the duration of those two years, the grad student is lucky to break even. The B.S. holder that goes straight to work has two years of a level 1 salary (not that much, but significantly more than a graduate student.)
No, the PDA market is basically dead because everyone wanted convergence with their phones.
PDAs live on in smartphones and PDAphones. All of the previous PDA operating systems that are still alive (PalmOS, Windows CE/Mobile) are now in convergence devices. (Previously known as smartphones, but Microsoft has bastardized that term to mean crippled devices without a touchscreen.) Non-phone Palm and Windows Mobile devices still do exist, but they have insignificant market share compared to their integrated phone/PDA brethren.
1) Most people are happy with the 2.8" screen of devices such as the AT&T 8525. If you want larger, you have other options such as the HTC Advantage X7501 2) That was worked around ages ago with QWERTY keyboards, and modern PDAs have "slider" keyboards that are reasonably large. 3) True, but not needed for a PDA to be good. In fact, I believe that significant work was not put into speech recognition for PDAs because in 90% of the situations you use a PDA, you don't want to be making noise. In the 10% you do (using it as a phone), one common to "speech recognition sucks" is that voice dialing works quite well.
If Apple were to release a non-phone PDA, it would flop.
If Apple were to release a business-oriented (iPhones are explicitly banned for storage of any business-related information at my company because they have insufficient data protection.) iPhone that was more open, it would do quite well, although in my opinion to succeed in the business market (where Crackberry is still a major player, and if anything is dominant, Crackberries are the only mobile devices approved for access to corporate email at my company) the device would need a hardware keyboard of some sort. Perhaps a somewhat thicker iPhone with a main touch interface and a slider keyboard.
The Newton's handwriting recognition was absolute shit, and the device was incredibly slow and anemic.
My father's first PDA was a Newton, it lasted a year before being supplanted by a Palm Professional. The Palm Pro blew the Newton away in terms of responsiveness, and Graffiti only took 30 minutes to learn and unlike Newton's handwriting recognition, actually WORKED.
Sadly, Palm got lazy and started coasting. After a progression of Palm Pro (hand-me-down when dad got a Palm III), Palm III (hand-me-down after dad got Palm V), Kyocera 6035 (first Palm I bought myself), Treo 600, and Treo 650, I've moved to the Dark Side and have a Windows Mobile-based HTC TyTn II on order. (I had an AT&T 8525 aka TyTn for 25 days but returned it when I learned of the TyTn II's release.)
In my opinion, the Newton deserved to die. At one point my family had one and it was the clunkiest most anemic device we'd ever used.
A year later my father got a Palm Professional - It kicked the Newton's ass handily, and was a fraction of the price of the model of Newton we had (I forget which one.)
As to Newton II - As I see it, iPhone = Newton II.
1) Lenovo is 100% "mainland China" controlled. Apparently it has quite a few direct connections to the political parties in power. 2) Many computer designers/manufacturers have headquarters/engineers in Taiwan but manufacturing facilities are often on the mainland.
Oh, the IFR was a LONG way from becoming commercially viable (It was a proposed research/test reactor for the technology), and breeders are still very much a research-only phenomenon, but a major contributor to this fact is that even research breeders get axed/not approved because of shortsighted and/or clueless politicians that don't understand what they're regulating.
You've gotta crawl before you can walk, but politicians keep on stopping researchers/designers from crawling.
There are probably plenty of openings for the kind of job you're looking for that do not require being an actual member of the armed service you are working for. All branches of the U.S. military have plenty of civilian employees, and there are likely plenty of civilian openings in your field with the Navy.
To achieve this goal, instead of being water-moderated (like in all civilian US reactors), it was graphite-moderated.
This meant that if the water boiled off, it would actually increase output power (among other things). U.S. civilian PWRs lose the ability to continue the reaction if the coolant disappears because it is also the moderator.
In the case of Chernobyl, the graphite moderator had other problems - When the initial steam explosion occurred, the lid on the reactor pressure vessel was blown off, and exposed the graphite to air. Superheated radioactive flammable material + oxygen = BAD.
Chernobyl could not have happened in any U.S. reactor, both due to differences in safety policies and in fundamental reactor design. The worst accident in U.S. history (TMI) released less radioactive material into the environment than some coal-fired power plants release in just one day of operation due to trace amounts of uranium in the coal they burn. (There's one coal plant in Utah that is especially bad I believe.)
Given the choice of living 5 miles from a nuclear PWR, and 5 miles from a coal plant - I'll take the PWR!
It basically becomes impossible to achieve that and still have a net energy output.
To simplify things greatly - Many of the byproducts (especially the final one, lead) poison nuclear reactions and make it so that if the fuel contains more than a certain amount of those byproducts, it is no longer capable of sustaining fission.
Unfortunately, most current reactor designs (including new ones) are quite inefficient in this regard. More efficient reactors get shot down for various reasons. For example, the IFR research reactor was shut down by politicians because of proliferation concerns - even though the reactor was less of a proliferation threat than even normal civilian PWRs. (They saw "breeder" and instantly thought "nuclear weapons" even though the IFR waste material would have been useless for producing weapons-grade fissiles.)
The IFR had some great advantages - It was far more efficient in terms of extracting energy from uranium, and it could burn basically any actinide (including those normally considered "unburnable waste" from other reactors). Compared to PWRs, its waste was MUCH more radioactive (bad), but significantly shorter lived (very good) - Something like 50-100 years half life for the longest-lived byproducts, as opposed to thousands of years for the waste actinides from PWRs.
(As an example, load Slashdot from a mobile device, enjoy scrolling through the left sidebar before you reach any interesting content.)
Not only does formatting have to be simplified for a good "mobile user experience", but so does layout and sometimes even content.
The embedded versions of Opera aren't that great. I tried it once, it wasn't much better than Pocket IE, most "non-mobile optimized" sites had major usability problems.
Compare the Google mobile portal ( http://www.google.com/m ) and www.google.com and get back to me.
You'll see that http://www.google.com/m is designed more as a "mobile portal" (including support for location-based services depending on your mobile service provider, for example it automatically detected my location when adding weather.) than the basic www.google.com search page for desktops.
Google at least allows the user to override which page they use if user-agent-based detection fails though.
Most likely, this is not a case of software destroying the hardware.
It is a case of software destroying other software.
i.e. installing the update on an unlocked iPhone will corrupt the bootloader of the phone, effectively destroying it (unless you have the ability to reflash it with JTAG, which only Apple has for now.) without actually doing any hardware damage.
If they could they would. Most likely there was no way to do that.
They have explicitly banned Xboxes detected as containing a modchip from Xbox Live, and I'm not sure if they refund any remaining time on your account if it is banned for that reason.
Most subscription services have a clause in the contract/EULA that says "If I violate the TOS, any remaining time/funds on my account are forfeit."
Slashdot Mirror
Their past with DAoC can be both good and bad.
Good: DAoC had a great initial design
Bad: Mythic has a nasty case of "Killer DM" syndrome. They ignored the complaints of their playerbase for two years after ToA's release without doing anything until it was too late and WoW provided another place for the playerbase to go. By the time Mythic finally fixed ToA (prompted by their plummeting subscriber numbers) it was too late.
And of course, EA is now in the loop. They don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to MMOs... How many games have they attempted to launch that either never made to launch or were spectacular failures after launch? I don't know the numbers, but it's 100% of any MMO attempt from EA so far.
"One thing I really like about the USE of the iPhone (rather than just cataloguing model numbers) is that with a full modern Web browser in my pocket at all times, I'm eating the lunch of all the business people in your company who are either chained to the Web via PC or away from the Web, using the Internet for email only. They are standing still to me. Email is like 1950, the Web is 1990, and Web 2.0 is 2005 so I'm like 55 years ahead of the people who work at your company. Like I said, I'm eating their lunch. And at a broader selection of better restaurants because it's so easy to find them and make reservations with an iPhone."
Encrypted email is more recent, especially encrypted local storage of emails. That's apparently too new for the iPhone (locally stored emails and other data are not encrypted). Same for anti-tamper (after more than N botched logins, locally stored encrypted data is deleted, preventing a brute-force attempt.)
Admittedly, both PalmOS and Windows Mobile don't come with such features by default, but unlike the iPhone, the manufacturers of PalmOS and Windows Mobile devices realize their customers might want something that didn't come with the phone in the first place.
I have (well had - my 8525 was returned and I ordered an unlocked HTC TyTn II, hopefully it will be here by the end of the week) a full web browser in my phone, and if for some reason Pocket IE is deficient for me, I have at least three alternatives (Opera Mobile, Minimo, and there's at least one other).
Comparing the Blackjack to the iPhone ($99 with contract vs. $399 with contract) isn't really a good comparison. While it is ahead of the iPhone in terms of ability to run third-party apps (and is why it was included in my list), it is crippled in other ways. It runs Windows Mobile "Smartphone Edition" - While smartphone used to be a good term meaning "integrated PDA and phone", Microsoft has redefined it to mean a crippled Windows Mobile device without a touchscreen. Still, given a choice of iPhone or Blackjack, I'd take the Blackjack myself, since it's a far more flexible device despite the lack of touchscreen. Heck, I'd rather use my old Treo 650 than an iPhone since I'm not an Apple zealot (OS X is a nice OS for desktop users, but it has by no means outclassed Windows or Linux in all areas as you claim it has, especially not a combination of Windows and Linux used in the areas which each excels.) That said, I went for something better than both devices.
I've heard people commenting "but the iPhone runs OS X!" - iPhone OS is to OS X desktop as Windows Mobile is to Windows XP - They are a completely different animal from their desktop variants.
Where in the world did you get Sprint or Verizon from?
Or maybe original poster should have been more clear that in addition to Verizon/Sprint EVDO, AT&T also has a 3G network (UMTS) which the iPhone is incapable of using?
"3. The one thing that this article failed to mention that the other AT&T phones are handsets with limited OS installed and low data rate capabilities, and this is a smartphone with a reduced feature version of OS X installed and alledged high data rate capabilities. The point being that the iPhone is a little more complicated than a free Nokia or Motorolla phone."
The iPhone is a crippled dumphone compared to other phones sold by AT&T such as:
AT&T 8525 (aka HTC TyTn/Hermes - now obsolete, will be replaced by the HTC TyTn II/Kaiser aka AT&T 8925 aka AT&T Tilt within a few weeks) - Full support for third-party apps, UMTS capability (iPhone only does EDGE), slide-out keyboard (so much nicer than a touchscreen), and about the same price as an iPhone with contract.
Samsung Blackjack - Also does UMTS, somewhat crippled compared to the 8525 (Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition, i.e. no touchscreen), but far cheaper. (See the other poster talking about their Blackjack.)
AT&T/Cingular 3125 - One of HTC's lower-end smartphones. Still, it's Windows Mobile based which means it fully welcomes third-party apps.
Palm Treo 750 - Somewhere in between the Blackjack and 8525. Touchscreen, but slower CPU than the 8525 and no WiFi.
AT&T also has the Treo 680, which doesn't do 3G and is using the aging PalmOS, but given a choice between an open-to-developers PalmOS and the iPhone, I'll take PalmOS. I'd rather stay with my old Treo 650 than use an overpriced cripple like the iPhone.
The iPhone has the distinction of being the first phone to be explicitly named as "not approved for business use" by my company. Admittedly, anything not explicitly approved is verboten for accessing email, but the iPhone has the distinction of being the only one explicitly called out as being forbidden.
I don't know about IMPS, but in the case of XMPP vs. SIMPLE:
XMPP started out oriented towards instant messaging and presence, voice signaling (Jingle) was added later
SIP started out oriented towards voice signaling (actually session initiation for voice and video), messaging and presence were added later with SIMPLE.
Essentially what started out as standards covering two distinct arenas were extended to accomodate a desire for convergence/integration, with the end being that there is now significant overlap between them.
That said, XMPP does messaging/presence better than SIP as it was designed primarily for it, and SIP does media session signaling better than messaging/presence as that was its primary design. Microsoft Communicator is the only SIMPLE implementation (if you could even call it that because it is so badly mangled) I've seen that is typically used for messaging/presence first and media secondary.
Yes, but in the case of diabetes, the disease is defined by the final symptom, not the root cause.
The root cause serves to differentiate between the various causes of the final symptom (excessive urination due to elevated sugar levels in the blood), allowing the disease to be subcategorized. (Type I has a different root cause than Type II for example, they are both considered diabetes due to having the same end result.)
If a disease does not cause excessive urination, it is not diabetes in any form, even if its root cause may be related to some forms of diabetes.
Also, while the "root cause" might be insulin-related in Alzheimer's, the end symptom does not include elevated bloodsugars, which cause frequent urination. Thus Alzheimer's is NOT another form of diabetes, even if it is somehow affected by insulin, as frequent urination does not occur.
The term Diabetes originates from the Greek word for "to pass through" or "to siphon", referring to one of the most obvious symptoms of elevated bloodsugar, frequent urination. Also, there are forms of diabetes that do not even involve insulin and elevated bloodsugars.
I know of at least two very general categories of diabetes:
Diabetes Mellitus - Often referred to simply as diabetes, and "diabetes" without a qualifying term is generally accepted to mean DM. In DM, when excessive urination occurs, it is always laden with sugar due to elevated bloodsugar. All of the categories of diabetes listed above are variants of DM.
Diabetes Insipidus - Characterized by excessive urination without elevated levels of sugar in the urine. It is diabetes, yet has nothing to do with blood sugar levels or insulin malfunctions.
So while Alzheimer's may be caused by some sort of insulin malfunction, it is not diabetes, as the defining symptom of diabetes is not present.
(Posted by another Type I)
Nokia has a bad habit of purchasing companies that develop software and products for their competitors and then killing said products.
For example, a few years ago they bought out a PalmOs developer (who at the time made NOTHING for Nokia phones) and then killed off all of that developer's product lines. (If I recall correctly, it was one of the developers of instant messaging applications.) I don't remember the name of the developer off of the top of my head.
Now, I don't foresee Nokia killing off Navteq product lines in a similar manner, but I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a LOT harder for people who develop software for Windows Mobile or PalmOS to license Navteq data. (It's hard enough to license Navteq data as it is...)
I've seen a number of reports that just like Apple, Nokia does not permit unsigned apps on Symbian phones.
It's really sad when a Microsoft product (Windows Mobile) is the most open of the mainstream mobile OSes. You get a warning the first time you try to run an unsigned app on a Windows Mobile device, but that's it.
The only thing more open than Windows Mobile I've seen so far is OpenMoko. Most of the other Linux-for-phone implementations appear to be Tivoized to varying degrees.
Except Apple has not bricked any unlocked cell phones. (Excepting a handful that failed the update which would likely have been bricked anyway - I recall seeing somewhere that the number of bricked phones is very small, and about equal between unhacked and hacked phones.) Let's face it, any firmware flash contains some risk. (I don't know how Apple has been handling truly bricked phones, everyone seems to be interpreting "reset to factory defaults" as "bricked".)
The only thing that has happened is that third-party apps have been rendered inaccessible and the SIMLock has been reinstated. Nothing more. For all practical purposes bricked if you bought the phone to do something it wasn't advertised as being able to do, but by no means actually "bricked" (as in completely inoperable.)
"This update is not security-related"
Yes, in fact, it is. Have you ever heard of log timestamps?
Yup. In fact, in many cases, it turns out that Ph. Ds actually have a HARDER time finding employment (at least in the corporate world) because they are too specialized. So the cost/benefit analysis for "do I go to grad school or straight to work" is rather unfavorable for obtaining an M.S., but it is even worse for a Ph. D.
In my situation - I have an M.S., although I'm beginning to regret having spent the time obtaining it. I hardly use any of the knowledge I gained in my current job, and it basically only hurt me financially. While I had a deal where it basically cost me nothing to obtain my graduate degree, this is the basic situation:
An M.S. typically takes two years to complete.
At my company, an M.S. gives a new hire an automatic promotion to a "level 2" pay grade.
At my company, the average time it takes for a new hire with only a B.S. to get promoted to a level 2 is two years.
So at the end of two years, you are (on average) at the same pay grade regardless of whether you went to graduate school or not.
For the duration of those two years, the grad student is lucky to break even. The B.S. holder that goes straight to work has two years of a level 1 salary (not that much, but significantly more than a graduate student.)
No, the PDA market is basically dead because everyone wanted convergence with their phones.
PDAs live on in smartphones and PDAphones. All of the previous PDA operating systems that are still alive (PalmOS, Windows CE/Mobile) are now in convergence devices. (Previously known as smartphones, but Microsoft has bastardized that term to mean crippled devices without a touchscreen.) Non-phone Palm and Windows Mobile devices still do exist, but they have insignificant market share compared to their integrated phone/PDA brethren.
1) Most people are happy with the 2.8" screen of devices such as the AT&T 8525. If you want larger, you have other options such as the HTC Advantage X7501
2) That was worked around ages ago with QWERTY keyboards, and modern PDAs have "slider" keyboards that are reasonably large.
3) True, but not needed for a PDA to be good. In fact, I believe that significant work was not put into speech recognition for PDAs because in 90% of the situations you use a PDA, you don't want to be making noise. In the 10% you do (using it as a phone), one common to "speech recognition sucks" is that voice dialing works quite well.
If Apple were to release a non-phone PDA, it would flop.
If Apple were to release a business-oriented (iPhones are explicitly banned for storage of any business-related information at my company because they have insufficient data protection.) iPhone that was more open, it would do quite well, although in my opinion to succeed in the business market (where Crackberry is still a major player, and if anything is dominant, Crackberries are the only mobile devices approved for access to corporate email at my company) the device would need a hardware keyboard of some sort. Perhaps a somewhat thicker iPhone with a main touch interface and a slider keyboard.
The Newton's handwriting recognition was absolute shit, and the device was incredibly slow and anemic.
My father's first PDA was a Newton, it lasted a year before being supplanted by a Palm Professional. The Palm Pro blew the Newton away in terms of responsiveness, and Graffiti only took 30 minutes to learn and unlike Newton's handwriting recognition, actually WORKED.
Sadly, Palm got lazy and started coasting. After a progression of Palm Pro (hand-me-down when dad got a Palm III), Palm III (hand-me-down after dad got Palm V), Kyocera 6035 (first Palm I bought myself), Treo 600, and Treo 650, I've moved to the Dark Side and have a Windows Mobile-based HTC TyTn II on order. (I had an AT&T 8525 aka TyTn for 25 days but returned it when I learned of the TyTn II's release.)
Not just bad press, bad user experiences.
In my opinion, the Newton deserved to die. At one point my family had one and it was the clunkiest most anemic device we'd ever used.
A year later my father got a Palm Professional - It kicked the Newton's ass handily, and was a fraction of the price of the model of Newton we had (I forget which one.)
As to Newton II - As I see it, iPhone = Newton II.
Just a different way of saying the same thing. (Think about WHY the void coefficient was positive...)
1) Lenovo is 100% "mainland China" controlled. Apparently it has quite a few direct connections to the political parties in power.
2) Many computer designers/manufacturers have headquarters/engineers in Taiwan but manufacturing facilities are often on the mainland.
Oh, the IFR was a LONG way from becoming commercially viable (It was a proposed research/test reactor for the technology), and breeders are still very much a research-only phenomenon, but a major contributor to this fact is that even research breeders get axed/not approved because of shortsighted and/or clueless politicians that don't understand what they're regulating.
You've gotta crawl before you can walk, but politicians keep on stopping researchers/designers from crawling.
There are probably plenty of openings for the kind of job you're looking for that do not require being an actual member of the armed service you are working for. All branches of the U.S. military have plenty of civilian employees, and there are likely plenty of civilian openings in your field with the Navy.
Chernobyl was one such example.
To achieve this goal, instead of being water-moderated (like in all civilian US reactors), it was graphite-moderated.
This meant that if the water boiled off, it would actually increase output power (among other things). U.S. civilian PWRs lose the ability to continue the reaction if the coolant disappears because it is also the moderator.
In the case of Chernobyl, the graphite moderator had other problems - When the initial steam explosion occurred, the lid on the reactor pressure vessel was blown off, and exposed the graphite to air. Superheated radioactive flammable material + oxygen = BAD.
Chernobyl could not have happened in any U.S. reactor, both due to differences in safety policies and in fundamental reactor design. The worst accident in U.S. history (TMI) released less radioactive material into the environment than some coal-fired power plants release in just one day of operation due to trace amounts of uranium in the coal they burn. (There's one coal plant in Utah that is especially bad I believe.)
Given the choice of living 5 miles from a nuclear PWR, and 5 miles from a coal plant - I'll take the PWR!
It basically becomes impossible to achieve that and still have a net energy output.
To simplify things greatly - Many of the byproducts (especially the final one, lead) poison nuclear reactions and make it so that if the fuel contains more than a certain amount of those byproducts, it is no longer capable of sustaining fission.
Unfortunately, most current reactor designs (including new ones) are quite inefficient in this regard. More efficient reactors get shot down for various reasons. For example, the IFR research reactor was shut down by politicians because of proliferation concerns - even though the reactor was less of a proliferation threat than even normal civilian PWRs. (They saw "breeder" and instantly thought "nuclear weapons" even though the IFR waste material would have been useless for producing weapons-grade fissiles.)
The IFR had some great advantages - It was far more efficient in terms of extracting energy from uranium, and it could burn basically any actinide (including those normally considered "unburnable waste" from other reactors). Compared to PWRs, its waste was MUCH more radioactive (bad), but significantly shorter lived (very good) - Something like 50-100 years half life for the longest-lived byproducts, as opposed to thousands of years for the waste actinides from PWRs.
Still, that only affects formatting, not layout.
(As an example, load Slashdot from a mobile device, enjoy scrolling through the left sidebar before you reach any interesting content.)
Not only does formatting have to be simplified for a good "mobile user experience", but so does layout and sometimes even content.
The embedded versions of Opera aren't that great. I tried it once, it wasn't much better than Pocket IE, most "non-mobile optimized" sites had major usability problems.
Compare the Google mobile portal ( http://www.google.com/m ) and www.google.com and get back to me.
You'll see that http://www.google.com/m is designed more as a "mobile portal" (including support for location-based services depending on your mobile service provider, for example it automatically detected my location when adding weather.) than the basic www.google.com search page for desktops.
Google at least allows the user to override which page they use if user-agent-based detection fails though.
Most likely, this is not a case of software destroying the hardware.
It is a case of software destroying other software.
i.e. installing the update on an unlocked iPhone will corrupt the bootloader of the phone, effectively destroying it (unless you have the ability to reflash it with JTAG, which only Apple has for now.) without actually doing any hardware damage.
If they could they would. Most likely there was no way to do that.
They have explicitly banned Xboxes detected as containing a modchip from Xbox Live, and I'm not sure if they refund any remaining time on your account if it is banned for that reason.
Most subscription services have a clause in the contract/EULA that says "If I violate the TOS, any remaining time/funds on my account are forfeit."